Native American Resistance to Euro-American Hegemony in Momaday’s The Moon in Two Windows

Abstract

This study analyzed N. Scott Momaday’s screenplay The Moon in Two Windows in order to bring the marginalized Native Americans and their literature into the centre and to explore Native American resistance to Euro-American hegemony through Dollimore and Sinfield’s model of cultural materialism. There are four traits of Dollimore and Sinfield’s model: historical context, close textual analysis, theoretical method, and political commitment. Cultural materialism expresses power relations in the text written in the past in order to interpret the texts within the context of contemporary power relations. It studies the hegemony of the structure of power for identifying the co-occurrence of the subordinate and oppositional cultural forces. It tends to challenge the hegemony of the dominant Euro-American culture and ideology. This qualitative study explores how Euro-Americans exercised their hegemony over the Native Americans and how Native Americans resist the Euro-American cultural hegemony through the imaginative revival of Native culture in the mainstream American society that has been explored from The Moon in Two Windows. Native American Studies and cultural materialism will get benefit from this work.